Esther Kahn (2000)

Most undeservingly overhyped movie of all time??

just watch it!

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Boring and appallingly acted(Summer Pheonix). She sounded more Asian than Jewish. Some of the scenes and costumes looked more mid 20th century than late 19th century. What on earth fine actors like Ian Holm & Anton Lesser were doing in this is beyond me.

I rented this thinking it might be interesting, and it might have been an interesting story except that is was told in such an uninteresting manner. Hard to follow, strange editing, disjointed storyline, the characters mumble, all in all a dreadfully dull waste of time. I just couldn't get into it and didn't care what happened to the characters - not even Ian Holm could save this film. Unless you need a cure for insomnia, I'd skip it. 3/10, and that's being generous.

This is an extremely dense, somber, and complicated film that unravels quite slowly, revealing excruciating detail, like the attention paid in a novel, and watching this film "IS" like watching a novel unfold. While I didn't care for the narrator, as I felt he was out of balance with the rest of the performances, this film features some of the best ensemble acting I have ever seen, and the lead, Summer Phoenix, is fabulous. Her innocence and naivete some might find implausible, sort of a cross between Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland. I can buy that critique, but she's still fabulous, partially because she's unlike anything I've ever seen before.This film is unbelievably beautiful, filmed by Eric Gautier, and part of what is so unique about this film is how it doesn't ever show what you'd expect. It's always surprising, and despite it's length, the film never reveals more than it needs to. At 163 minutes, it's extremely concise, to a fault, I'd say, which is one of the wonders of this film. It's filled with brief moments which are simply stunning, some of the best you're likely to see all year, and all these moments add up in the end to an extraordinary film experience. The family moments are unique, Ian Holm is brilliant, and what this film has to say about the theater hasn't been seen in films since Cassavetes' "Opening Night," or perhaps Chaplin's "Limelight." But, believe it or not, this film is much "less" conventional. I never knew where this film was going, and now, having seen it, it still has multiple possibilities. This is a powerful, incredibly provocative film.

The point of the vastly extended preparatory phase of this Star is Born story seems to be to make ultimate success all the more sublime. Summer Phoenix is very effective as an inarticulate young woman imprisoned within herself but never convincing as the stage actress of growing fame who both overcomes and profits from this detachment. Even in the lengthy scenes of Esther's acting lessons, we never see her carry out the teacher's instructions. After suffering through Esther's (largely self-inflicted) pain in excruciating detail, we are given no persuasive sense of her triumph. The obsessive presence of the heroine's pain seems to be meant as a guarantee of aesthetic transcendence. Yet the causes of this pain (poverty, quasi-autism, Judaism, sexual betrayal) never come together in a coherent whole. A 163-minute film with a simple plot should be able to knit up its loose ends. Esther Kahn is still not ready to go before an audience.